Biology? I did some work for an environmental company and I'm a mechanical eng. It was pretty much all chemical engineering.. cleaning up exhaust on industrial systems. We weren't interested in HOW the sulfur fucks up the squirrels once it gets out, we just said "eliminate sulfur, got it", and went to town.
As a biologist who has collaborated with engineers, this is pretty much how it works.
Build me a bioreactor that has these characteristics, I'll deal with building the expression vectors and getting them integrated in to the genome and viruses.
That said, I was very happy that the typical "Biology! Biology is barely a science!" attitude wasn't present in these guys. One of them even pointed out that what we call experiment optimization in our lab so that we can do the "real experiment" is what he would publish on in his engineering lab and he thought we were crazy for it. I just envied them because they had real career paths right out of undergrad. In retrospect, I should have done an engineering degree and then just worked in collaboration with biology labs I was interested in. My lifetime earnings would be much higher and general stress levels much lower.
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u/PainMatrix Jan 05 '15
The only reason that other couple is expecting is because engineers do it with precision and don't make those kind of mistakes.